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Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS

Posted by Mike Fratto
August 02, 2012

Vendor: Rackspace
Product Family: Open Cloud
Availability: Today

What Is It? Open Cloud is a suite of offerings based on the OpenStack cloud environment, which runs on the open source XenServer. Open Cloud includes the following new services:

• Cloud Servers, a server virtualization offering;

• Control panel, a customer portal for managing all Rackspace products, and;

• Cloud Databases, a MySQL 5.1 database service.

Open Cloud also includes the following services, which are in limited preview release and should be available by the fourth quarter:

•  Cloud Monitoring

• Cloud Networks, which is based on OpenStack's Quantum module; and

• Cloud Block Storage, based on Swift.

Three existing services--a content delivery network (CDN) called Cloud Files; Cloud Backup; and Cloud Load Balancers--round out Open Cloud.

Problem Statement

Cloud computing platforms tend to lock customers into proprietary file formats and service APIs. Since there are few standards governing cloud computing, relying on an open source project like OpenStack means customers face fewer lock-in issues from their cloud service providers.

Vendor Claims

• No lock in with Cloud Servers.

• Support for hybrid cloud usage models, which allows users to run public and private clouds across multiple cloud providers.

• High-performance MySQL instances with Cloud Databases. The instances are partitioned from other customers and metered like a utility based on CPU and RAM usage over time.

Next: Analysis of Rackspace's OpenStack Cloud Services

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